Tuesday, 21 January 2014

I thought it would be good to give an update before we get too far into the New Year. It's still January, I have friends whose Christmas trees are still up, so I can still safely say Happy New Year.
I hope you had good times with your family over Christmas. We had a very special Christmas together as a family and with friends and enjoyed a few days holiday in the new year.

However, It was also an eventful time in which we were reminded how much we value your payers for our families health and protection.
In December, Sarah was involved in a traffic accident when a small petrol tanker rear ended our vehicle.
The vehicle thankfully sustained only a little damage to the rear bumper and the door which was a little dented/bent. Although, Sarah felt some pain in her spine at the time of impact there has been no pain since.
Also, on Christmas Day some thieves attempted to break into our home. Thankfully Mark interrupted them, they fled and nothing was stolen.

For the MAF Uganda program, Christmas was busy, as our pilots in particular flew extra hours to assist in the evacuation of many expats from Southern Sudan when political tensions triggered fighting there. We are seeing some missionaries now returning to Southern Sudan but the political situation continues to remain tense. Please pray for this fledgling country and its leaders....that there would be peace. Pray that the church would be salt & light at this difficult time.

Mark & I continue to keep busy. I shall be doing a fair amount of work overseeing the care of MAF visitors in our program for the next few weeks. This involves shopping for their food, planning meals and making sure the 'empty' home they are staying in is prepared for them.
As of today, we now have two new planes in the program. The diesel 182 arrived from the Netherlands this evening. Our new caravan was recently licenced and has just started operational flights......so Mark is definitely not bored.

I shall leave you with some pictures of the children doing some of their favourite activities.
Amy (now 8 yr) has been doing ballet lessons for 6 months . She is quite a dancer and this picture was taken at her first performance in December.
Joshua (6) is turning into a caring and thoughtful boy. A favourite past time of his is lego....you can never have too much lego and it's even more fun when Dad is there to build with!
Abigail (15 month) is a cheeky little monkey who keeps us all on our toes and gives us something to laugh about every day.

The Newnham Family

We come from quite different backgrounds (Sarah, a well-travelled Missionary Kid and Mark having grown up in a Christian family in the same town his whole life).We were married in 1999 having met at our home church in Gillingham, Kent. Here Sarah worked as a speech and language therapist and Mark as a Quality Technician for BAE Systems. In 2000, we felt called to full-time mission service abroad.

Mark trained to become an aircraft maintenance engineer with Missionary Maintenance Services in Ohio, USA and we then served with MAF in Uganda from 2005 -2016 where Mark worked as an aircraft maintenance engineer.

In 2016 we moved to Liberia with our three children where Mark is now serving as Chief Engineer as part of the new and growing team in Liberia.

We are privileged to have a team of supporters behind us who pray, or give, or both.